The shared tragedy of Red Queen hiring
Runaway selection happens when organizations compete with each other far beyond the point where it’s rational to do so. We see this in species as well–peacocks have ungainly and inefficient feather displays because, as Alice’s Red Queen said, “It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.”
In organizations, there’s a desire to do good work. Pressure to outdo the others. And a desire for deniability and certainty. Add those up, and we are left with a quest for more long after it’s helpful.
How many people applied for that good job you just posted? 1,000? Spread the word, more applications must be a good thing. It’s not unusual for digitally-amplified hiring processes to see 5,000 applications arrive in a day. 360,000 people applied for a slot in the Goldman Sachs internship program. Would a million have been better?
And then, let’s use AI to pick the 80 best candidates and interview each via Zoom.
Take the ten best and put them through a series of interviews, rotating through each person on the team, including aptitude tests and real-time projects. In many organizations, there are 6, 7 or even 10 rounds of interviews.
It costs a typical organization more than $14,000 to hire an executive, and the time and emotional cost to applicants is many times that. This all leads to lowered productivity, wasted time and a damaged brand.
What do we get in exchange for this investment? Are the people you hire with this exhausting/exhaustive process adding more value than the ones we found with much less time ten years ago?
And the second question: would your third or fourth choice have worked out just as well, if not better?
If Red Queen hiring actually worked, then we’d see that organizations that spend more time on it would outperform those that don’t. It’s pretty clear to me that this isn’t the case–it’s not an investment in the future, it’s a sign of bureaucratic stasis, a quest for deniability, and a thoughtless pursuit of the wrong sort of more. We’ve made it much easier for people to apply for jobs, but done little to improve what happens after the applications arrive.
What if we spent the time wasted on Red Queen maximization doing something useful instead–training and orientation, perhaps. Interview until you find someone who can do the job, then hire them. Then get back to work.
We can’t even ask that question, because it feels like a compromise. Without any data at all, we’ve bought into the Red Queen race that our false proxies, sufficiently polished, deliver better results. In fact, there’s a huge increase in the cost to the applicants and the organization, but no measurable increase in the value created.
Successful fishermen understand that casting an ever-wider net is not always the best way to catch the fish you need.